I have recently re-designed my website, with a nice new clean looking layout that I am quite proud of.
Only local images are allowed.
http://rosskendall.com

The custom theme was created for the current Drupal 4.7.3.

It is just a one column layout, because I like the simplicity of the design and I really didn't need more. There is a nice CSS drop-down menu integrated which works really nice.

Main goals were: attractive, accessible, usable.

Haven't quite got all the content up yet, but the main bits are there.

Would like to know what other people think.

Cheers,
Ross.

Comments

treadLightly’s picture

I like it. I'm a big fan of clean, simple websites. It looks good and it gives focus to the content rather than an elaborate interface. The CSS drop-down looks great too.

rkendall’s picture

I like to keep in mind the universal design axiom: Form follows Function.

Which I interpret for web design as: Good graphical design follows site usability (function and content). Although you haven't achieved good 'design' until you have a site that is both usable and attractive.

Those are my ideals anyway, which I'm working towards.

Michelle’s picture

I like nice simple themes. You're right that a lot of sites these days have far too much clutter. I just bought a domain name from Godaddy an hour ago and I think I got eyestrain from it. LOL

Any chance of you releasing the them minus the custom graphics / colours? This would be a good one to have as just a basic framework. With a different graphic and colour changes, you have a whole new look.

Thanks for sharing,

Michelle

--------------------------------------
My site: http://shellmultimedia.com

rkendall’s picture

I'd be happy to contribute a theme based off my design if others would find it useful.

jansky’s picture

you can bet in a lot of people (me included) that would find it useful (and nice looking...)
Please share!
Jan

drupaceous’s picture

Very nice theme!

would be a great addition to the current drupal theme collection.

sciman’s picture

I love the simplicity and clarity of the theme and would love to work with it for developing a website for a b&b run by a great lady in Mexico.

Homerus’s picture

As a starting Drupal developer I would be very gratefull if you would decide to share this theme, I think I can learn a lot of it. In all the templates on the Drupal site I found no one with a dropdown menu with childs, except for yours :-)

venkat-rk’s picture

Yes, nice and clean.

Is the blog section a vocabulary with all those terms? I mean, is 'blog' the parent term of the vocab and the rest its child terms?

rkendall’s picture

I used taxonomy for the categories under 'blog', and I made a small change to make the default 'depth' to 'all' instead of '0' - so that all child items will show in the parent 'blog' category.

See comment on bottom of this thread:
http://drupal.org/node/41349
as I have said, I would like it if this changed in the core.

I'm just using story nodes for my blog posts instead of 'blog' nodes, as I don't need all that multi-blog stuff.

venkat-rk’s picture

Thanks for the clarification:-)

John McV’s picture

Looks great. I'd love to see how you got the dropdown bar to follow the creation of new nodes. Is it all in taxonomy then?

John in France

.carey’s picture

+1

drupaceous’s picture

I would already be happy with a short explanation to point us in the right direction. :-)

venkat-rk’s picture

I was curious about this too. Perhaps it's just a placeholder/note to self?

rkendall’s picture

I have used the Drupal 'Primary Links' menu, just instead of having it in the side-bar, I have put it in a block at the top of the page (the theme doesn't use the standard 'primary' and 'secondary' links). I have all the menu items expanded, and then styled it into a drop-down menu with CSS.

So, whenever I add an item to the drupal menu, it shows up in the dropdown.

To make things a bit neater, I have friendly URL aliases for each taxonomy term, and then used the friendly link in the menu.

I'm still tweaking a few things with the design and layout at the moment - when I get time. I should have a version ready to contribute as a theme soon.

--
Ross Kendall
UK based Web and IT consultant specialising in Free and Open Source Software technologies.
http://rosskendall.com

drupaceous’s picture

I am not sure if I understand correctly. Did you use taxonomy at all for the drop down menu, since you mention the URL aliases for taxonomy terms? Or did you only use the Primary Link Menu? The drop down menu items, are they secondary links then?

[edit]
ok, please ignore, I finally get it now :-)

rkendall’s picture

Hi,

I'm working on a version of the theme that I can contribute (ie. without my logo, etc). I'll post some more information shortly.

Cheers,
Ross.

dvessel’s picture

A simple theme like that is easier to take in. I agree with the idea that the page should focus on the content, not a million links on the sidebars. I'm aiming for the same thing. Focus the page structure on the document but still have other elements without confusing visitors. Too much clutter and it dilutes what the page is about.

Good job & good luck with new theme.

joon

rkendall’s picture

Didn't realise it had been so long, been quite busy with other things but I have finaly got things together to contribute a theme based off my website's theme.

Just committed to CVS, available here:
http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/drupal/contributions/themes/nokoala/
I will now try and sort out making it available as a regular download.

I've decided to call the theme 'No Koala!', hope someone finds it useful.

You can see an example of what it looks like here:
http://nokoala.rosskendall.com

(Obviously, the 'koala' is my logo, that's why there isn't one)

Cheers,
Ross.

--
Ross Kendall
UK based Web and IT consultant specialising in Free and Open Source Software technologies.
http://rosskendall.com

Michelle’s picture

I was just thinking of this theme yesterday and wondering if you ever commited it. Thanks!

Michelle

--------------------------------------
My site: http://shellmultimedia.com

rkendall’s picture

and thanks for sorting my screenie!

--
Ross Kendall
UK based Web and IT consultant specialising in Free and Open Source Software technologies.
http://rosskendall.com

rkendall’s picture

For anyone interested, the download is available from the project page here:

http://drupal.org/project/nokoala

The 'cvs' version is fine to use with drupal 4.7.x

--
Ross Kendall
UK based Web and IT consultant specialising in Free and Open Source Software technologies.
http://rosskendall.com

mariagwyn’s picture

Ross,

I like the idea of your theme, especially your use of nice menus. But I have a problem with the menus that I thought your theme might address, but it doesn't quite do so, so I thought I would ask. In the past on my website, I have used HVMenu (from Gus Verslius) to create a stable, JS dropdown, and incorporated into my drupal site (see http://stnina.org/whatsnew). It works fine, but for future management pursposes, I wanted to switch to something drupal based (nice menus) so that links can be added by someone without ftp access. So, I uploaded nice-menus, and now your theme as well.

The problem is this: the drop down menus disappear before I can get my mouse over them. You can see your theme at work on my menus at http://testsite.stnina.org/dev/whatsnew. I have made no changes to your theme, just to see if your menus worked better than my other css version (you have to change themes to see that one). Any ideas? I would appreciate your help if you have a moment.

Thanks,
Maria

rkendall’s picture

Hi Maria,

My theme does not use 'nice menus', rather it is a CSS dropdown menu that does not rely on javascript (except for a small helper script for Internet Explorer. The menu is based off the suckerfish menus by Patrick Griffiths.

The menu in my theme uses the Drupal 'Primary Links' menu to make the dropdown. Read the brief install notes on the No Koala! theme download page.

I had a quick look at your site, which looks very nice. Perhaps the gap between dropdown menu items is causing problems (although it worked fine for me in Firefox.)

Cheers,
Ross.

--
Ross Kendall
UK based Web and IT consultant specialising in Free and Open Source Software technologies.
http://rosskendall.com

mariagwyn’s picture

Ross, thanks for the response. Since I posted, I did figure out the problem, which was too large of a margin between top level and subsequent levels. I actually switched back to my theme, rather than yours (I had already built the multiple columns) and put your menu in it. I like the simplicity of your menu. 'Nice Menus' is rather complicated CSS. Of course, I just discovered that I did not pull over your handy little .js for IE, so I need to make some further adjustments.

I have one question though. Do you know of a way to automatically add a class, such as "last" or "final" to the last item in a list? Automatically? I am curious b/c I am using a little background image in between the list items, but I don't want it to show on the last item.

Okay, I have another question. What is the difference between your menu and 'nice_menus'? Other than the fact that in 'nice_menus' you can do more than one menu. I assume that your script only allows for a single menu, the primary? Is there a way to allow more than one of your menu on a page? I don't need it, I am just curious.

Thanks, and nice work. I have never had the time to really work through the suckerfish stuff, though it has been on my list.
Maria

rkendall’s picture

Hi Maria,

Can't really give you a full response as I'm in the middle of moving house, and have stuff to do!

Firstly, I can't really take credit for the 'helper' javascript, that is copied from suckerfish: http://www.htmldog.com/articles/suckerfish/dropdowns/

Don't see any reason why you couldn't have more than one menu, perhaps I'll have a try sometime to see how it goes.

About adding the class, I had a go at that once before, but can't remember how I sorted it (involves theme function override I think).

I haven't really looked at 'nice menus' since I usually think of javascript menus and not being very 'accessible', that is why I took an interest in the suckerfish CSS menus.

Good luck with your site, it's looking really good.

Ross.

--
Ross Kendall
UK based Web and IT consultant specialising in Free and Open Source Software technologies.
http://rosskendall.com

InigoMontoya’s picture

Hi Ross,

First, thank you for taking the time to produce such a nice theme. I'm using it on a personal site and it's very nice and easy to work with. The only issue I've encountered with it is on IE7 and the way it handles :hover, since IE6 works just fine with the CSS you've provided.

I am curious, do you have plans on updating this theme to make it Drupal 5 compatible?

Thanks again,

Allan

rkendall’s picture

Hi Allan,

Thanks for your post. Just responding quickly to your question, I do intent to fix the IE7 drop down issue, and also make the theme available for Drupal 5.

Someone submitted an 'issue' for the IE7 problem - with a patch as well, however I do not have IE7 as I run Linux (although I do have IE6 on linux). If you want to help out you could test out the patch:
http://drupal.org/node/102127

I think there is a typo in the above patch, as the li.hover doesn't exist (probably intended to be li.sfhover.

I'll look at Drupal 5 changes and issues in a couple of weeks after I get a project out of the way.

Cheers,
Ross.

--
Ross Kendall
UK based Web and IT consultant specialising in Free and Open Source Software technologies.
http://rosskendall.com

valley-1’s picture

A great deal for business.
http://affiliatesexcel.com

Hello Ross,

Just aquestion about taxonomy which I can never understand not being a specialist.

I have some catogories of Blogs (some imported from WordPress) as well as Blogs by different
members.
I am trying to catogorize the Blogs under catogories and set up
some vocabularies in the Catogories menu in the admin Like Blogs
Technical Blogs, Personal Blogs etc.
I can't see how to allocate the last two under the vocabulary Blogs
so they become child for the Blog catogory.

Could you please shed some light on how and where to do it?

I have done the code change you have suggested to the taxonomy.module
to get them to appear below Blogs menu

Many thanks in advance

Luneh’s picture

Hi,

I am quite new to Drupal but enjoy it a lot. I had a hard time configuring nice-menu for my website but am quite happy with it now. Except that I have problems with IE7. Colour of the font is not appropriate and drop-down menu does not show.

I must admit that I unfortunately did not understand the patch that you are linking to. What code do I add and where? In the patch, it seems that part of the code (h1 a, etc.) is not full. Can you please help? I would be very grateful.

You can see my website there:

http://www.hyboria.info

It is currently still under construction, so be not surprised if nearly everything in the menu drives to the front page.

Thanks in advance for your help

Johnny’s picture

Hello All,

I have been pursuing redeveloping my site and it's navigation system as it is growing very quickly with content as there is almost 500 forms of content and still growing.

I like the idea of less clutter and I hope one day I wont need a side bar but getting on with it in my search for great menus I have found this free CSS menus site http://www.dynamicdrive.com/. Maybe most already know of the site but I am posting it here as I have always tried to do the most with what Drupal offers right out of the box for free which is more than I have found anywhere else! So if you find something there that leads your site to where you need it to go then my satisfaction is earned.

Kind Regards,

Johnny

http://mybanffphotographer.com

http://therockymountainblog.com

dicky’s picture

Hi Ross,

I installed your theme yesterday and have started playing around with it - its just what I needed.

However, in IE and FF, with the menu I found that if there was a menu item with child items, when I hovered above it it would not display the child items until I clicked on it and "activated" it so to speak. I've noticed that it doesn't do this on your site.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Richard

John McV’s picture

Make sure you've checked the "expanded" box for the primary links menus. That fixed it for me.
John in France

melperez’s picture

Hi, I'm very (VERY) new to Drupal. I love your theme and would like to use it... However, when I implemented it, my main menu (the dark gray bar at the top) shows the items on top of each other instead of side by side like you have with Link 1 versus Link 2, etc. Could you please break it down for me as to what I could be doing incorrectly? I would greatly appreciate it! Thanks.

melperez’s picture

I fixed it myself. I had to go in and edit the css. I changed the #nav ul.menu to include "display: inline;"

bdornbush’s picture

I assume that there is a way to login to the site so you can administer it, such as add or change content. I don't see a login block on your web site. How do you login?

Also, how is the upgrade to 5.0 going?

bdornbush’s picture

I guess no one felt the need to respond to me as I asked an easy question. You can login using

site/?q=user

I set up a test site using 5.1 and installed this theme. So far, it all seems to work without any changes using Firefox or IE7.

timbadolato’s picture

whoo!
Thank you for any response :)

-Timothy B.

adrianmak’s picture

I downloaded and studied your theme. I didn't find any code that extract each item from the primary link and apply each of them in class, ul, li such that to match css menu style.

rkendall’s picture

The theme doesn't require any code to extract each menu item. By default Drupal outputs menus as a list (ul, li, etc), so the theme uses the existing classes and html structure but applies the necessary CSS to convert an expanded menu into a drop-down menu.

Since the primary links feature in Drupal is only a flat list of the top level menu items it is of no use for a drop-down (as the sub-items are required as well), that is why my theme just uses the regular menu block.

It will work for any menu, not just the one you assign for primary links. The only requirement is that you configure the menu block to appear in the 'top menu' region of the theme.

Have a look at the style.css file, perhaps then it will make more sense.

--
Ross Kendall
UK based Web and IT consultant specialising in Free and Open Source Software technologies.
http://rosskendall.com

L5eon’s picture

TinyMCE (textarea wysiwyg editor) didn't appear even though it does for other themes. So I copied the following line from another template file (page.tpl.php) into Nokoala theme's template file, after the "print $head" and "print $styles" lines:
<?php print $scripts; ?>
Thank goodness, it seems to work great. Hope this helps someone.

Another thing is a lack of styling for third-level menus:
Primary
item 1
item 2
item 3
item 3a
item 3b

These two styles added to style.css will do the basics:

#nav ul.menu ul {
  background: transparent;  /* so the sub-sub menu will be a block on its own */
}
#nav li li li {
	margin-left: 3em;   /* shift the sub-sub menu right a bit */
}

The only remaining wish-item for Nokoala would be unique ids on the primary menu items so I can style each one differently: #menu1, #menu2, etc. Any possibility of help on that front? Where would I find the appropriate place to accomplish this?

Thanks for a beautiful style, and good implementation of Suckerfishies, which I've used in so many other places but had a hard time finding for use in any CMS.

--eon--

rkendall’s picture

A couple of helpful points you mention. I should get moving and sort those things out.

BTW. you can add bug reports / feature requests, etc. in the 'issues' for the project here:
http://drupal.org/project/issues/91123

Cheers,
Ross.

stubynyc’s picture

That was driving me crazy...fixed everything nicely.

manoz_79’s picture

Hi, wanted to know wheather this theme is available for download for Drupal 5.1 aswell, I could not locate it in the Downloads.

mmobarter’s picture

Great looking.

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mmobarter